Saturday, July 08, 2006

Teen Drinking and Croquet

A bit of a rush job -- the staff at the NY Times wanted a 'graphic novel' approach to the subject. I proposed to show the life of one red-headed kid, from the first discovery of his parent's liquor cabinet to his days at college.

Cramer Krasselt contacted me to create an image for a benefit at the Penfield Children's Center, where prints of the image will be auctioned off while patrons play croquet at a bowtie event. At the same time, the VP of creative at Atlantic Records contacted me about creating a portrait of her two daughters, and I told her about the Penfield project. I don't usually do portraiture, but this seemed like a good opportunity to raise more money for the charity by asking her to donate the cost of the painting to the event as well. A nice example of synchronicity.

Sorry for the lack of updates on jamesjean.com . . . been working on projects for Fast Company, Best Life, Runner's World, Gyro, Nike, Paramount, WB Records, and something for the city of Seattle.

Teen drinking.....explains soooo much. I wonder if the scientists had fun making the rat pass out after drinking 10 beers. That's really pretty horrible. They ruined those rats lives. They won't ever make it through college.

you seeem to really capture the dated art nouveau feel of the portraiture which i am extremely biased towards. in addition, the cause it is going towards as well as your plan to contribute more towards the organization makes this piece even that much more remarkable.

i really love the texture of the poster. the layers really give a nice depth to the piece. it looks like you're letting your blue pencil come out a lot more in this piece, i like it that way. it pushes back the linework and lets me enjoy the subtleties in the design. the spots of raw colour are awesome. thanks for posting this stuff.

The comics page is terrific looking, and only makes me lament the fact that you do so little comics work. You're so good at it. If this was in fact, a "rush job" , by all means, keep knocking it out. I want to see more comics.

Since most color comics are published by the big guys (marvel and DC) , and the palette tends to veer from very shiny marble collection, to psychodelic acid astro bright, It's refreshing to see such a simple subdued pallette applied to comics. I wish it were the rule rather than the exception. It seems like comics coloring was better before laser printing, when the colorists had to make do with fewer colors. I could see a pallette like this even working in the old 4-color newsprint comics.

The poster is beautifully painted, and I like those little orange accents of color, with those saturated green yellow and orange birds popping just perfectly.

I love the doing one thing that satisfies two projects. Especially since it was a request that you normally wouldn't be able to honor with your tight schedule of making really neat artwork and IMing with Mr. Hoshine. That's GETTING THINGS DONE. See, you're part of the cult and you don't even know it. Welcome to the fold.

The croquet balls and other red elements just glow to me. I'm loving the recent return to more and more painting. But, I have to admit that I was wondering when we'd perhaps get to see some more tasty figure drawings. Are you still able to keep a regular sketchbook?

Thanks for the comments, everyone! Dex - yes, I used photoshop to alter the colors of the original painting a little. Logan - Sadly, I haven't found the time to go figure drawing lately. I do have a sketchbook, but it's mostly for jotting down ideas and small thumbnails of compositions for future paintings.

When i saw the poster i was amazed it's so cool:) i had the same reaction that shellywan ,i said "oh my god" (in portugueses) :P.I love the graphic novel aproach to the alcohol subject, specially the linework at the last panel on the boy, and the blur on the dots.I guess you said on this blog you were making a small story for fables. Is it done? Can you show some more comics that you made?